There are a lot of mysteries out there.

Journalists and designers developed the infographic as a way to interpret vast amounts of data. And what has a vaster amount of data than the final frontier? That’s right—NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory recently started JPL Infographics, where space nerds and graphic design wizards can take NASA data and create their own illustrations. Take a look at these ten infographics and brainstorm a few ideas of your own.

Are We Alone in the Universe?: A list of possibly habitable planets.

NASA’s Space Shuttle: The United States shuttle program has been shut down, but its manned spacecraft is still a technological marvel.

The Moon 1990-Future: A catalog of the various countries that have landed on Earth’s only natural satellite.

Space Invaders: Do you believe in aliens? A surprising number of people do.

Space Race: How far away from the planet have we gotten?

Big Brothers: We’ve managed to litter even the vast blankness of our skies.

15 Things You Didn’t Know About Space: It’s a myth that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made object you can see from space. What other facts have you missed?

50 Years of Space Exploration: Where we’ve been, where we should go.

Funding the Final Frontier: Bravery isn’t the only currency that the space program recognizes.

Women in Space: Sally Ride isn’t the only woman to crack the glass ceiling.

Image: Sweetie187.

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If you’re looking for the next big environmental catastrophe waiting to happen – look up.

There are around 900 satellites up there, busily keeping the world connected. They’re immersed in a sea of spacecraft fragments and garbage nicknamed space junk. There are parts of rockets, fragments of destroyed satellites (some of them very fresh indeed), gloves…even, would you believe, an astronaut’s tool bag that can occasionally be spotted whipping across the night sky (and here’s how it got up there).

Around 18,000 pieces are larger than 10cm and can therefore be tracked and avoided. The rest? An estimated 580,000 further objects above 1cm in diameter. And all of these are hurtling round at orbital velocity, with enough kinetic energy to punch through spacecraft armor, destroy systems worth millions of dollars and endanger the lives of astronauts. It’s way beyond being a nuisance and makes a shocking picture.

And it’s not going away by itself. Space is a biologically inert environment. Anything you leave up there will stay left, pristine, until it spirals into the Earth’s upper atmosphere and burns up. This could take centuries – and that’s a very long time for world Space programs, because if a piece of scrap hits anything else, it creates more junk. It’s a tiny junk-making machine that’s powered by our own planet – and there’s over half a million of them up there.

The answer? Treat nearby Space the same way we want to treat our precious ecosystem – with rules, regulations and penalties. Cleanup acts are currently far too expensive, but penalizing astronautical litterbugs could be a way to stop this junk-belt developing further.  Otherwise, somewhere down the line our night sky will be a glittering, inaccessible, lethal sea of junk – and we’ll have shut the door on humanity’s future.

Images: buglugs, quimix

The post The Sky's the Limit: Space Gets Trashed appeared first on EcoSalon.